From cow dung to biogas to carbon credits for Nepal

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Early this year, I visited several households in the small village of Bela located in the Kavre district of Nepal, about 50 kilometers from the capital Kathmandu. Mr. Niranjan Sapkota’s house was located on a steep mountain surrounded by forests. I had to walk along narrow mountain paths, grabbing on to bushes and sometimes hands of accompanying local staff. I was going to verify if the biogas plant Mr. Sapkota had constructed in the February of 2005 was still in operation.  I turned the brass valve in the kitchen and with a hissing sound, gas flowed and the family pointed to the meal that they had just cooked using biogas from cattle dung that they had in plenty.

There are 225,000 such families in Nepal who now have easy-to-operate biogas plants in their backyards. Bela is considered a model biogas village with almost every house equipped with a biogas plant.

Last month, the Nepal’s Biogas Program reached an important milestone: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), for the first time approved and issued carbon credits to two Nepalese biogas projects. To date, this is the largest worldwide issuance of carbon credits, or Certified Emission Reductions (CERs), in a Least Developed Country (LDC). Two more similar projects from Nepal are now at an advanced stage of being registered with the UNFCCC. Together, these projects are expected to generate about 170,000 carbon credits per year, which is equivalent to avoiding emissions from approximately 60,000 cars every year.

For most women living in this mountainous region of Nepal, looking for firewood every morning was a daily ritual. This program reduces the time spent collecting firewood and, since they are no longer exposed to the indoor smoke from burning of firewood in traditional stoves, it also dramatically improves the health of these women and their children. Other important benefits of the program are lessening the pressure on deforestation and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The program mainly targets isolated and socially marginalized groups in rural Nepal, who can’t access or afford to use modern cooking fuels such as LPG and have been buying kerosene or charcoal, or collecting firewood. Realizing the multiple benefits associated with promotion of biogas plants, the Government of Nepal has decided to use carbon credits as one of the important financing instruments to scale up the implementation of the program. The World Bank’s Community Development Carbon Fund committed US$ 7 million to the program to purchase the carbon credits that it generates, and a US$ 5 million grant was provided by GPOBA (the Global Partnership on Output-Based Aid, a partnership program administered by the World Bank) to subsidize the construction of the biogas plants.

For the last several years I have been working with this biogas program. The road to getting carbon credits for the program has not been easy. It has taken over four years to get the first batch of CERs successfully verified and certified through the UN system. The challenges included finding appropriate and credible ways to monitor and quantify carbon credits from thousands of biogas plants that are spread over long distances and located in remote areas.

The deadlock was cleared this past August when the UNFCCC issued the first CERs for the projects. By September 2011, over 92,000 CERs have been issued to the first two registered projects. These carbon credits are helping to offset the cost of owning and operating the plants and making the projects financially sustainable over time. In our evaluation, we found that more than 95% of the biogas plants were operating smoothly after five years of installation, demonstrating the robustness of the technology as well as the quality of program design and implementation. The monitoring system developed in collaboration with the World Bank also works well. Hopefully, this can provide a model for similar projects in other countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa where firewood is still widely used for cooking.

Seeing the women of Bela in their homes, spending time with their children instead of scouring the countryside for firewood, made this long road to certifying and verifying emissions completely worth the effort.

 

 

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Authors

Kirtan Chandra Sahoo

Portfolio Lead – Results Based Finance

Hugh Yoon
October 13, 2011

It's a great advanced model in undeveloped countries!! I plan to conduct a community development project in northern Kenya, Korr, from next year. Could you imform me How can I get some detail informations of the 'biogas plant' technology?(Please contact me: superworldtramp@gmail.com)

david k waltz
October 14, 2011

Congratulations on a very practical, useful and challenging project!

Anonymous
October 14, 2011

A good one and a great beginning. A small program setting big precedents to address global public goods. Should be scaled up in all LDCs where possible.

Keep it up.

Hema Shrestha
October 14, 2011

If all householders install this plant instead of passing the toilet waste in the drainage or using safety tank in urban area, our river might be very clean. People can use the gas from their toilet waste and organic kitchen waste through this plant and they can save the energy. So, please encourage to those people also who living in urban area.

Great job !good luck 11

Thank you

dhruba dhakal
October 15, 2011

Now a days every home uses lpg gas for cooking rice in our village so our expenditure is increasing day by day. Our income sources are imited. If we can use our free natural resources we can change our life. We can increase our income. So this is very important and necessary for us

Kimbowa Richard
October 17, 2011

Congratulations. it provides inspiration for many in the South that despite the lengthy process of CERs verification through the UN system, it is possible. it also opens debate on whether the current verification process is an incentive or a disincentive for similar projects

RAMA
October 20, 2011

Congratulations. It's very interesting. I stongly believe its sustainability, and I am sure the team will achieve replicability in LCDs

Kirtan Sahoo
October 21, 2011

Glad that you see the potential to replicate similar model in Kenya. I will be happy to provide you more details on the technology. A very good start would be to look at the Nepal BSP Website (http://www.bspnepal.org.np/biogas-design), that provides much of the technical information. You can clearly see that depending upon the cattle ownership of the households, the plants can be sized differently. The amount of gas that can be produced, and th number of hours a stove can be used to cook food, for different feed rates (which is linked to cattle ownership), is also mentioned. Lets be in touch on emails. My email id is ksahoo@worldbank.org. Let me tell you that the technology is pretty simple. Ofcourse technology is important, but in such
programs, the program design and implementation including institutional and financial arrangements are even more
important. A lot can be learnt from Nepal that has pursued this program with lots of passion and dedication. Lets be in touch. Kirtan

Tonui wilson
August 19, 2014

wonderful, just amazing - wish that would happen in the whole world!

Ashok Emani
April 30, 2015

Great Kirtan. You must repeat it in Orissa as well.

stephen Kangethe
February 26, 2014

That is a wonderful concept. People have however not accepted the concept. I am interested in leaning more about the whole system.
Regards
Stephen

niraj kathayaat
November 29, 2019

hey i further want to study about this programme

Palesa Alice Phoba
December 10, 2021

I would like to know more about cow dung biogas
In my country we still make it dry

before we can use it as fire to cook.

Kindly share more on how to take it to biogas level